Jackie Gleason plays Chris Christie — or is it the other way around? — in prospective Voice of Baltimore horror flick.  (Ya gotta read the col- umn or you’ll never understand!)  Gleason is at upper left and lower right — or is that Christie?  …No, it’s definitely Gleason; the comedian at upper right and lower left is Christie.  [Composite Photos/VoB Staff]

CREATURE DOUBLE-FEATURES
AND TALES FROM THE CRYPT
SET STAGE FOR 2016 DEBATES

Nuclear fear of 1950s/’60s
spawned movie madness
featuring monsters, ghouls
and aliens from outer space

ALSO FILM AND TV CHARACTERS
WITH MANNERISMS REMINISCENT
OF TODAY’S TOP OFFICE SEEKERS

POD PEOPLE IN POTUS PROFILE?
 
By David Maril and Alan Z. Forman
 
“It’s only a movie, folks.  Remember… it’s only a movie.”

That was the disclaimer feature-film audiences, especially at drive-in theaters in the 1950s and ’60s, used to hear as assurance that the fear they were experiencing from the horror images on the big screen would end once the film projector stopped rolling and moviegoers went safely home.

That’s the way it was back then when theaters were swamped by countless numbers of films with frightening themes connected to science fiction and horror, including creatures from outer space, all sorts of strange mutants, and earth-born “monsters” as well.

Oftentimes the plot-lines involved otherworldly aliens living surreptitiously among us in disguise, plotting to take over the earth…  Like Donald Trump. Or Ted Cruz …or Hillary Clinton.

But where’s the disclaimer for the horror of the 2016 presidential race? including the prospect of a blowhard or a felon becoming America’s next President? or a candidate so unqualified as to make even the toughest cynic shudder?

Are the perfidious POTUS prospects, prevaricating Pod People in presidential profile?

The list of this fear-drenched 1950s/’60s movie genre includes such “classics” as “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” “The Wasp Woman,” “House On Haunted Hill” and “Night of the Ghouls” (all released in 1959); “The Giant Claw,” “Daughter of Dr. Jekyll” and “Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957); “The Terror” (1963) and “Teenage Zombies” (1960), to mention just a few.

Moviegoers during this Cold War period were living through an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Audiences could not resist an hour or more of screams and tension to take their mind off real-world concerns related to the threat of Communism and nuclear war.

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Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the only remaining presidential candidate of the two major parties to ignore an invitation
to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual Policy Conference last week.  What was he thinking?  (Photo/Mother Jones)

 
A resident of Hymietown
 
By Bjarne Rostaing
 
Presidential aspirants got a wonderful opportunity to kiss the AIPAC ring at their 2016 Policy Conference last week, and did so expertly.

It’s not as easy as it might seem, and groveling may be necessary, as with Lord Trump’s backing away from the ridiculous idea of neutrality in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

There is also the issue of how wet the AIPAC kiss should be, how long, how passionate… and how ridiculous.

The one thing that is absolutely unacceptable is to ignore the Policy Conference altogether, yet this is exactly what Bernie Sanders did.

The fact that he’s Jewish makes it all the more stupefying. Just keep campaigning? Is he mad? Has he lost his mind up there in the Vermont boonies?

But that’s what he did, and from this Sea of Tranquility rose a huge gaseous bubble no one wants to talk about because of the smell.

Being myself a resident of Hymietown — a/k/a New York, as Jesse Jackson so named it — I know lots of Jews, and I know that a lot of them aren’t crazy about AIPAC, the Israeli settlements, dual-citizen- ship, Bibi (Netanyahu), or the Israeli Prime Minister’s in-the-presidential-face address to the U.S. Congress a while back.

They know there’s a not so Silent Majority of the Non-Chosen that questions how much money should be pumped into that nation’s thriving economy, and that some of these natives are getting restless.

That is more than significant.

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Baltimore riots, 1968: A man lies dead in the Free State’s largest inner city in the days following the assassination of Martin Luther King, who had been fatally shot outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

     ROOBY TAWR, a novel in progress
     set in mid-20th Century Charm City
 
                             By Joel Foreman
 
Zebadee Fullwood took a bullet in the lung on Biddle Street during the 1968 riots and died on the way to Union Memorial Hospital.

He could have survived. The ambulance medic working on Zeb was a fully competent, seasoned fireman named Mick Braden. If Zeb hadn’t mouthed off, Braden probably wouldn’t have done what he did and Zeb would have lived.

Braden and Zeb knew each other — tangentially — from the time when Zeb was pulling the Rooby Tawr molds around the corner from Engine No. 38, the fire station on West Baltimore Street, slightly down from Fremont.

On warm days Braden was often out front jawing it up with his buddies. They’d get a laugh and snicker when Zeb passed by. Braden had been stationed at No. 38 since 1953, the year before the Department hired its first Negroes.

“We’re going to hell!” is what he had to say about that.

Anybody who knew Zeb would agree with Miles Michael’s opinion that Zeb “had a mouth on him.” Miles was Reuben Michael’s brother and Rooby Tawr partner. As the one who made up and handed out the small manila payday envelopes every Saturday, he’d had countless run-ins with Zeb.

In Zeb’s opinion, which he shared more than once with Deuteronomy Graves, “Ruby and Miles got the money. And we be the ones makin’ it for them.

“For what? $50 a week! They got cars. They got houses. That dips**t punk Roger come in here with his new shoes. His new pants. His new sweaters. And what I got? Holes in my soles! A room in a slum landlord’s piss-poor property. Hand me downs from the Salvation.”

Miles confronted Zeb once, wanting to know, “Why don’t your people help themselves, the way the Jews did?”

Zeb had replied, “Jews never been slaves in America. Slavery’s the devil’s curse on this mu’f**kin’ country. Maybe there ain’t no niggers in chains no more, but the poison of slavery — that’s still here.”

Zeb always said his Momma raised a son who wasn’t about to defer to no man, black or white. That’s why Zeb had to get out of his home town of Doddsville, Mi’ssippi. Life there was intolerable.

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Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard last week risked her polit- ical career by resigning as a Vice-Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders for President.

IRAQ WAR VETERAN FROM HAWAII
STANDS UP TO BE COUNTED…
FOR SEN. BERNIE SANDERS

First American Samoan and Hindu Member
of Congress has courage of convictions

BUT CHAIRWOMAN FAWNS OVER HILLARY
 
By Bjarne Rostaing
 
There are times when you stand up to be counted, and the Sanders campaign is creating them.

Leading up to Super Tuesday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s godawful corrupt fawning worship of Mrs. Clinton actually trumped the stench rising from the Other Party.

Fear and stupidity vie in Schultz, along with ineptitude, tone-deaf blindness and other limitations. Gross clumsy unfairness with Sanders most of all. Clinton owns Schultz and neither cares who knows about it. Major media (Morning Ho, for example) manage to look the other way with clenched nostrils.

Through all this we have heard nothing from the sainted Elizabeth Warren, whose silence is eloquent but not golden. Massachusetts is her state, and was a pivotal one for Sanders, who would have taken it with just a little help from Warren.

Now she looks like, and probably is, simply another politician covering her behind. If there was greatness in her, she would have already joined Sanders, and become potentially a decisive running mate, providing a kind of leadership she does not have the guts for. She seemed close to Sanders in her thinking, and if there were integrity in her, she would be speaking on his behalf.

She’s not; she’s a de facto sister in arms with the least talented, most sold-out woman in national politics, deeply allied with the financial interests she professes to detest, and it matters.

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Office of the Governor:  Often a stepping-stone to the presidency, though not very likely in 2016 — unless John Kasich surprises (also quite unlikely).

WITH JEB BUSH AND CHRIS CHRISTIE GONE,
JOHN KASICH IS ONLY STATEHOUSE LEADER
STILL RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT THIS YEAR

No longer does being the chief executive of a state
provide easiest, most direct path to the White House

CURRENT AND FORMER GOVERNORS
FINISH AT BOTTOM OF PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES’ HEAP, HAVING LOST
THEIR ONETIME ‘NATIONAL LUSTER’

By David Maril

What happened to the prestige and respect the Office of Governor used to hold when presidential candidates were being selected?

As recently as a year or two ago, political pundits and party insiders were using Barack Obama’s lack of administrative experience as an example of how governors, who have to set budgets and run states, are better prepared to become President.

How many times have we heard the lamenting about all the politicians elected to Congress sitting in their Washington D.C. ivory towers and doing little but raising money for their next election campaign?

We are all too frequently told it is the governors who learn how to govern, making daily decisions that involve budgets, security, infrastructure, while handling emergency situations.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie accented the contrast between do-little politicians in Congress and working governors when he cross-examined presidential wannabe Marco Rubio on the debate stage. Rubio was reduced to a dazed state of repeating the same talking points, like a broken record.

The bottom line, however, is that Christie’s stature as sitting Governor in New Jersey did little to save his own campaign. He dropped out of the race a day after a dismal showing in New Hampshire.

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